It wasn’t that bad, gold just signals that the comment is good (intensity), but some of the other awards made explicit the way in which it is good (hue/flavour) e.g. funny, informative, creative, sarcastic…I actually liked the award system (even if I always was a bit suspicious of who was giving them and what their intentions were)

Reddit answers to shareholders and a board of directors. Each fediverse instance is run by its owner and negotiates with other instances to federate.

If some bigshot wants to own reddit or rule it like a totalitarian asshole, he can buy it and vandalize it if he wants to. If some bigshot wants to own the fediverse, good luck buying the thousands of instances that exist and they still wouldn’t get us, because we’d move to or create new instances.

I was gonna say that I never expected or wanted lemmy/mastodon to become mainstream anyway, far from it. And like dual-booting linux and windows, there are just some things I won’t abdicate in favour of convenience or having more followers/software or being on a platform with more market power.

But you know what, it’s a spectrum, from the volunteer/libre-heavy to the hideous proprietary tyrannies:

??? > FOSS > wikipedia > reddit > google > microsoft > twitter > facebook > ???

Maybe if we are able to accommodate a large fraction of the mod community of reddit and let the flexibility of federated diversity and “3rd-party apps” flourish against facebook’s top-down approach we might create a wikipedia-like oasis…

But probably not, because there is too much money to make in appmaking rather than written content creation.

But why do the current lemmy instances have to die if facebook decides to make ActivityPub+goldextra? We’ll just stay on our branch, maybe lose a few users who should know better. Facebook isn’t even making use of ActivityPub’s federation anyway, which is why we are here.

I’m actually afraid that they won’t defederate at some point but find some way to track the activities of the federated servers.

I’m justs enjoying what we have for a fleeting summer of joy, before zuck, gptbot floods and federation fracturing inevitably ruin everything again :/

but…why? Is it because interfacing between digital and analog representations of data, because of legacy systems, why are printers so annoying compared to screens and networks?